Information drives business. The ready ability to store information, process information and to transmit information is a facet of operations that businesses rely upon to conduct their day-to-day activities. For businesses that increasingly depend upon data and information for their operations, an inability to store data, an inability to process data, or an inability to transmit data can hurt a business' reputation and bottom line. Businesses are taking measures to improve their ability to store data, process data, and transmit data, and to more efficiently share the resources that enable these operations.
In order to ensure availability of shared limited resources such as data storage, data processing, and data transmission bandwidth, businesses can restrict the amount of a shared resource that an individual user may consume. Such restrictions typically take the form of resource quotas imposed upon users of the resource and enforced by information systems administrators. With such quotas enforced, an individual user can use an amount of a quota-limited resource up to his or her quota, and generally no more than that. In some cases, there may be an overflow quota so that a user can temporarily consume an additional amount of the resource without requesting the overflow from system administration, and thus allowing the user to plan reduction of demand for the resource.
In the event that a user requires access to a quota-limited resource in an amount greater than the user's quota, the recourse has been to request additional quota from system management. Often, a user will have to pay an additional amount of capital to acquire an increase to the quota. Further, the task of administrating quotas takes up time and resources of system administrators.
One method that has been used to alleviate issues raised by imposition of individual quotas has been to enact group quotas. Often, users work together in groups on particular projects and the group (or the group administrator) pays for the resources members of the group consume. System administration can give a group administrator a group quota to be divided up among the various members of the group. Such a group quota often requires communal use of the resource, thereby breaking down individual ownership-based protections upon which users rely (i.e., restrictions to files). Further, in a situation where the group quota is not implemented through a communal area, but rather divided up as individual quotas, system administration must still be involved in any redistribution of quotas among the users.
What is therefore needed is a solution that permits multiple users to share individual quotas that does not break down individual protections associated with the consumption of resources associated with the quota. Further, it is desirable to implement a solution that avoids the intervention of system administration to adjust quotas among users participating in a shared quota in order to avoid consumption of system administration time and resources.